Jane Fishman: 'Picketing the President' and suffragists, a Savannah octogenarian tells all

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Credit: Jane Fishman / For Savannah Morning News

Credit: Jane Fishman / For Savannah Morning News

Like many of us, Mary Nolan Brown didn’t know much about her great-grandmother. Nor did she care. She knew they shared the same name — Mary Alice Nolan (like many women in her family, lots of women were named Mary and Alice). She knew the woman grew up in Virginia (before it became West Virginia). She knew she had moved to Jacksonville, Florida, not far from Amelia Island, where Brown lived for many years.

But that’s about it — until the late 1970s. That’s when Brown happened to read something in the Jacksonville Times-Union in a section newspapers like to call, “Sixty Years Ago Today.” It was about a woman named Mary Alice Nolan Lennan, who in her 70s was incarcerated for picketing the White House. She was demonstrating for women’s right to vote. The year was 1919.

“Is she related to us?” Brown asked her aunt who happened to be visiting.

“Oh yes,” the aunt answered casually as if everyone in the family knew that.

Brown tucked that tidbit away — “I put it on the back burner” — and went on with her life. She and her husband Don moved to Savannah to their current home in Wilmington Island. He worked for Rayonier, Brown found a job at St. Andrews School, then the Georgia Historical Society. But the radical, passionate life of her great-grandmother, who fought for the 19th amendment to the Constitution and who no one talked about, tugged at her. She couldn’t let it go.

She started doing research. She checked the obituaries — always a fount of information. She searched for clues in her Aunt Lucy’s address book. She took a train by herself to Washington, D.C. — just like her great-grandmother did when she was picketing with suffragette Alice Paul – to scour the Library of Congress and the Sewell-Belmont House, the headquarters of the National Woman’s Party. She called the convent of Mont de Chantal, where Mary Nolan went to school, days before the abbey closed down for good.

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Credit: Jane Fishman / For Savannah Morning News

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Credit: Jane Fishman / For Savannah Morning News

Brown is dogged and curious. She likes to connect the dots. She couldn’t figure out why her great-grandmother’s grave site was unmarked, an affront that Jacksonville’s NOW chapter finally remedied. She’s a reader. When she was 10, her uncle, a university professor, sent her the “Iliad" and the “Odyssey” to read and a list of questions to answer. For every one she got right, he gave her a quarter. Her son was reading the French novelist Jules Verne in the third grade.

When she finished filling in the missing pieces as best she could, she decided to write a book about her namesake. It would be historic fiction. She’d call it, “Picketing the President.” She would tell it first-person through the eyes of Delia, Nolan’s (fictional) teenage granddaughter. Delia was shanghaied to accompany her aging and ailing grandmother to Washington. Reluctant at first, Delia came to appreciate what the women were fighting for. She felt guilty for her initial negative feellngs, her inability to stop the police from throwing her grandmother into jail, and then the Occoquan Workhouse where the mid-70s-aged woman was put to work. As the oldest suffrage prisoner, she spent six days in jail.

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Credit: Jane Fishman / For Savannah Morning News

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Credit: Jane Fishman / For Savannah Morning News

At 85, Brown had her book, her first book. She published it through Outskirts Press, a self-publishing service in Colorado. A few months ago Amelia Island Book Festival chose the book as one of 16 out of 80 submitted to be read in local schools.

“I had no idea what I was getting into when I started,” Brown said. No matter. She’s already closing in on a second book, “Trouble in Texas.”

Today, Brown, dressed in matching blue corduroy pants and a sweater set, wears a necklace fashioned after one the of the prison's iron gates, a replica of something Alice Paul gave to all the suffragettes.

“These women had every right to stand there and express themselves. It’s called freedom of assembly,” she said. “They were so bold; they had such courage. I’m hoping this will help young women see how important it is to be involved.”

Jane Fishman is a contributing lifestyles columnist for the Savannah Morning News. Contact Jane at gofish5@earthlink.net or call 912-484-3045. See more columns by Jane at SavannahNow.com/lifestyle/.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Jane Fishman: 'Picketing the President' and suffragists, a Savannah octogenarian tells all